The theatre business

On with the show

Good news for the grand circle

AROUND the world a building boom is under way in new theatres, concert halls, opera houses and multi-purpose buildings for live shows. At their annual conference in New York last month, members of the International Society for the Performing Arts, many of whom build or manage theatres, were cheerful about today—though worried about tomorrow.

The two main theatre-planning consultancies say they have not been busier. Willem Brans, boss of Arts Resources International, is fielding two or three enquiries a month for feasibility studies and advising on many projects, including a $200m concert hall in Orange County, California. David Staples, managing director in Britain for Theatre Projects Consultants (TPC), says his firm has work worth $4 billion in America and another $1 billion elsewhere in planning, design and construction. He led a team that created Singapore's $400m cultural centre, which opened in October.

There is a global “rash” of new theatres and especially concert halls, says John Tusa, who runs Britain's Barbican Centre, but the fastest growth is in America. There, says Mr Brans, 70-80% of the money going into new building or refurbishment is from private donors. Orange County is building its new concert hall entirely with private gifts. That makes commercial success likelier. “These theatres are being built by sharp local businessmen who don't want to be made fools of,” says Mr Brans.

Usually, support from cities—inspired partly by civic pride—is crucial to attract donations. Michael Hardy, boss of a $340m performing arts centre in Miami, Florida, that will open in 2005, says, “We are the economic capital of Latin America, and our aim is to become the cultural capital too.” Cities also think the arts help to lure relocating firms, though this much-touted effect has never been proven.

The quality of new theatres is better than ever before, boasts Mr Brans, largely thanks to the increasing professionalism of theatre planning and acoustic engineering. Theatres are no longer designed with a democratic absence of galleries but with rotten acoustics and sightlines, in flat fan-shaped boxes of concrete. TPC now makes increasing use of “multiform” halls, using a device, invented by Boeing to move aircraft engines on a cushion of air, to shift walls and seats.

Yet theatre-building is the sort of thing people do at the end of a golden era (as at the turn of the 20th century) when confidence is high and wealth is ample. Now, tax revenues are weak and wealthy donors less wealthy. The curtain may be about to fall, at least for an intermission.